SOCAT (only) reverse tunnel

I have a situation where we are trying to get data from one network to another - specifically access to a private maven repo on a different network. Network 1 contains a maven repo. And network is protected by a couple SSH hops where port forwarding is disabled on sshd. - [Laptop], running a Docker Container with VPN into other network laptop - Docker Container vpn - [Jumpbox] jumpbox.vpn.network.org - [Server] server.vpn.network.org We have successfully run vscode-server on **server** and connect via:

socat tcp-listen:8080,fork EXEC:"ssh server.vpn.network.org nc localhost 8081"

This lets laptop hit localhost:8080 and it tunnels traffic into our server.vpn which then goes into netcat and sends the traffic into vscode server I figure it should be possible to do the opposite I'm just getting stuck. The goal would be to run a Socks5 proxy on laptop via something like

ssh -f -N -D 54321 localhost

And then make a socat call into server.vpn.network.org and then using the socks env vars I could run maven and have it proxy back through the connection etc. The approach I took was trying this:

socat -v TCP:localhost:54321 EXEC:"ssh server.vpn.network.org nc -lkv localhost 54321"

It was "sort" of working but kept dropping connection. I then tried a combo of fork and reuseaddr and they didn't seem to solve the issue. My next approach was to consider unix sockets or something funky - but I'm wondering if somebody knows how to make this work. Thanks.